Sherry Li's Home

While you are writing and testing MDX queries in Microsoft SQL Server management Studio (SSMS), how many times you find yourself need to open the Visual Studio project in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) just to find out the dimensionality of a measure grou...

In Adventure Works cube 2008 or 2012, in the Dimension Usage tab, you will see that many intercepts of measure groups and dimensions are blank. To a specific measure group, the dimensions that have blank intercepts are un-related to the measure group. A...

Using variables in SSIS packages can make your ETL process more dynamic and respond to different scenarios during runtime. Not only we can use variables, we also have many different ways to set values for our variables. This is all good news for devel...

The book’s link is here, SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Blueprints. This book is a step-by-step, task-driven tutorial that goes straight to the practical development of reporting skills, explaining actions as they are taken. If you perform the role...

Reader Query My publisher recently forwarded me a question from a reader about the “Using the PROPERTIES() function to retrieve data from attribute relationships” section in Chapter 1 of the book “MDX with SSAS 2012 Cookbook”. “The following code seem...

When we are learning MDX, we unavoidably have to deal with the tools we use. Adding confusions about the behaviors of the different tools to our still fragile understanding of the MDX language itself can create huge frustration for learners. Here is on...

A co-worker recently worked on a SSRS report and wanted to use a specific manager’s team for testing. The Manager is a filter for the SSRS report and can take a fully-qualified member name as the default value. Using the Employee dimension in Adventure...

When tuning SQL queries, I find that I use the following three SET options quite often. set showplan_xml on When showplan_xml option is ON for a session, the execution of SQL queries in the same session will only show the estimated execution pl...

I came across Vincent Rainardi’s blog, and thought I’d share it with the readers. Sherry Li and Tomislav’s 2012 MDX Cook Book I’d also like to thank Vincent for writing up the review so quickly. I browsed through Vincent’s blog, and found that he au...

A co-worker recently asked me why she would get timeout when updating a column in a big table. This column will be updated to 0 (zero) because a default value of 0 (zero) constrain is now added to the table. The table has over 40 million records. Alth...